Salt, Fire, Earth, and Legacy
by ammcj062
Summary: Creation requires four things: gestation, birth, life, and death. Though not necessarily in that order.


_A/N: This was written for the spn-summergen 2016 fic exchange._ _Takes place in an AU deviating from canon some time after the boys find the Bunker and Dean receives the Mark._

 _Legacy (Gestation)_

Sam starts drawing sigils on loose sheets of paper he leaves scattered around the bunker. Dean growls and shoves them to the floor in a pointed manner, which only leads to Sam carefully picking through the sheets like some kind of weird Tarot reading. The ones face up he returns to the countertops; the ones face down he discards, drawing up new sigils to take their place until Dean has no more room to make sandwiches and the cycle starts all over again.

Greek sigils, Hindi sigils, Native American sigils, Celtic sigils, Egyptian sigils, too many sigils to remember them all. Sam disappears into the archives, buried up to his eyeballs in old texts, painstakingly copying each swirling line. He learns the story behind each one too, builds his already encyclopedic knowledge of each supernatural pantheon.

Dean throws a handful of them at Sam's chest one day. As Sam watches them flutter to the ground, Dean watches Sam watch them and asks, "What the hell is all of this for anyway?" He doesn't lie to himself that he can read all of Sam's secrets any more, but the stubborn impassivity is its own kind of clue.

"Symbols are important," Sam says. "They identify who you are."

Dean successfully fights the urge to rub the crook of his arm but he can't control his face to hide how true the words strike. Sam scowls, sympathy and frustration trickling over the impassivity until his face opens just a crack. Dean doesn't know everything about Sam anymore but he still has this connection, this ability to make his tight-lipped brother give his secrets up voluntarily if not easily.

"Our symbols are important. So we can define who we are, instead of letting other people put their marks there." His gaze hovers significantly at Dean's arm. There is a pause, Sam gauging how much he should say. He slides to a knee and reaches for a couple pages on the ground, flipping them over to see the rejected sigils with a thoughtful frown. "Most of them don't fit," he murmurs half to himself, "but we'll find something for both of us."

Dean thinks about his rapid-fire frustration, about every time he hurled the sketch of the Mark across the room while they were doing research on the damned thing and the sketchpad landed facedown. He'd taken pleasure in the predictability of the action without conscious thought to its certainty, wished the real thing were just that easy to cover up. Now, he wonders about the crawling over his skin every time he looked at it. "What are you up to, Sam? What's all this mean?"

Sam continues stacking the papers in two piles, refusing to meet Dean's gaze. "You should eat something," he says instead. "It's almost two o'clock."

 _Salt (Life)_

The sigil project stays within the confines of the Bunker. Outside, which means on hunts, Sam is driven and focused. Yet there's also an edge to his research that Dean hasn't seen in a long time – an earnestness, a frantic energy that wearied him to witness years before and leaves him exhausted down to his bones this time around.

Dean may drive across three states in a night to prevent the latest death in a rash of highway rest stop disappearances, but Sam is the one who throws himself out of the car before it's stopped fully moving and fires his sawed-off without certainty the entity they're hunting will be affected by it. He's the one who sprints after it into unfamiliar territory instead of regrouping for reconnaissance and a second chance later.

The latest victim – girl, hardly 17, crying and bleeding in equal free measure, clings to Sam's jacket afterwards. Sam rubs her arms and coaxes her beyond her shock, leaving Dean to talk away the officers and one insomniac local reporter who caught whiff of a story for a slow day. Dean flashes them a federal badge with his left hand and keeps his right deeply jammed into his jacket pocket. These men, tired and relieved someone else has done their job tonight, match Dean's mood far better.

He spins a story of a truck driver losing a custody battle and a federal agent doing a favor for a friend, locks the reporter down with the threat of legal action for publishing a minor's name. They pack the girl into the back seats of the Impala, head cushioned on one of the ragged Army surplus blankets they keep in the foot well behind the driver's seat. Her car is twenty miles back on the road with a blown tire and the trunk hanging open, a fistful of midges circling endlessly around the dim interior light.

Sam stays in the Impala with the girl to talk lowly and make notes on one of the blank notebooks he stashes in the glove compartment. Dean finishes changing her tire and leans against the back bumper for a minute, letting the chirp and rustles of a thousand summer insects wash around him while he eyes the surrounding ground for tracks. Silver reflective eyes peer out at him, making his heart race and his hand reach for his weapon – but they whisk away quickly, the raccoon chittering nervously itself.

Sam is half out of the car by the time Dean turns back towards it, shotgun low but with an unimpeded range to swing up should it be needed.

"Dean?"

Dean curses, dropping his hand from his belt and squaring his feet to the car once again. "Nothing. We ready to go?" He keeps his expression flat as Sam looks him over. Sam's always been better at reading Dean, and Dean's never had the heart to defend himself against it – but with his flashlight in his other hand he can flex his right hand safely in the shadows, cling onto his own kind of secrecy of action if not intent or feeling.

Sam's jaw firms until his gaze flickers to consider something far away and returns softer. "Yeah," he says. "Sure." He ushers the girl to her car. Dean slides into the driver's seat of Impala as she gets out, ignores the grateful smile she gives the both of them. Sam clasps her hand and tucks a piece of paper into it as they part. _If you ever have a problem_ , Dean can hear him say.

When was the last time they had time to worry about someone else's problems? Dean grasps for the answer and comes up blank. He folds the army blanket, tucks it back behind his seat while Sam settles into the passenger seat.

"Morgan has a step-brother in college."

 _Who?_ Dean nearly asks.

"He's graduating tomorrow; she was driving all night so she can make it in time for the ceremony. Thanks to us, she's going to be there."

Dean lets the ignition speak for him, pulls onto the road gradually instead of stomping on the gas to feel the Impala kick back. He knows they rescue good people; that's the reason he can get out of bed in the morning. But to know them, to watch them disappear back to uncomplicated lives – Dean can't handle the exhaustion of it any more.

Sam rubs salt between off his fingers and looks pointedly away. He doesn't say anything about giving her their number, the tenuous line of communication opened and left dangling. "I saw a place five miles up the road. I can get started researching tonight, see if anything hinky has happened in the area before."

Dean hums wordlessly in response.

 _Earth (Death)_

They managed to save Morgan, but Grant from New York is dead upon their arrival. Sam purses his lips tightly as he has for each of the dead they've encountered since Morgan. It's not enough, it's never enough, and while the sigil project remains Sam's dedicated project in the bunker he spends the rest of his time searching, searching, searching for whispers of cases. Dean follows because he must, but he spends long nights with his back to Sam and his laptop, bones aching.

 _You can't save them all, Sammy_ , hovers on the tip of his tongue. And you can't save them forever. The words wither before he gives voice to them, lost in the burning fog that haunts him, but Sam can read it in the unsettled shift of his weight and the slam of his car door.

"Every life is important, Dean," Sam tells him. "Especially the people who've met us, who know what we've done – that makes them ours." His eyes follow the loops of Grant's small intestines through the muck.

Dean would joke that Sam's become an old man, worrying about what he'll leave behind in the world, but they've had too many close calls for humor to eclipse. Instead he starts breaking down the pallets stored under a tarp in the nearby woodshed's overhang, building a tall hunter's pyre and a squat functional burn pit.

Grant from New York – Sam flips open his wallet and says the name with purpose, pressing bloody fingertips to his driver's license – goes on the honorary pyre. Sam had scraped every remaining organ together to lay out each piece like a full human again. He says the name, and Dean feels it sinking in like Morgan's name had. Morgan who will make it to her brother's graduation and Grant from New York. One survivor, one fatality. Both touched by the Winchesters on a nameless strip of Interstate 90.

The creature that had killed him goes on the burn pit, doused with less ceremony and only watched to make sure evidence of its existence can be reduced to ashes and bone fragments.

By the time the sun rises both fires have guttered out to light gray smoke and glowing ember. The wood pallets are gone, as are a gallon of gasoline and a bag of salt. Dean tramples the burn pit until the bone shards are dust and the ashes mixed into the mud well enough that only a hunt of discoloration betrays its presence.

Sam scrapes together Grant's ashes and walks slowly while he scatters half of them, murmuring promises of peacefulness and protection Dean tries his hardest not to hear. Sam used to say prayers for the people they had to burn to destroy evidence of, murmuring in nomine patris while he thought of angels. Now his words try to instruct them to an afterlife of Sam's own making, and he tucks the pouch containing the other half of Grant's ashes close against his breastbone.

Sam thinks they have to take care of these people, give them somewhere else to go now that Heaven is a shambles, but what does he think they can do?

 _Fire (Birth)_

"Hey, Dean," Sam says one day in the Bunker. "I want you to take a look at something."

Dean's been in bed all day suffocating slowly because his chest ached to expand enough for air and his arm burned until his shoulder twitched from holding muscles too tight. But he can do this for Sam, whatever it is, so he moves carefully over to Sam's table in the library and accepts the paper Sam holds out for him.

It's another damn sigil, bounded by a double ring and reminiscent of the Men of Letter's own Aquarian Star – but there's a symmetry and curvature to the design that draws Dean in, catches his eye and holds it steady. He is reluctant to let it go.

Sam leans over his shoulder and traces the patterns within it: the bisected circle for salt, the triangle for fire, the divided triangle for earth, the aquarian star with curved sides to project an image of two interlaced Impala's skulls. He is quietly pleased, energy thrumming against Dean's back with a heat that eases Dean's fatigued muscles.

Sam asks Dean if he trusts him. The answer is yes – but the trick to that answer is that Dean doesn't trust himself these days. Still, Dean goes where Sam goes. He follows him into the bowels of the Bunker, to one of the stark cement rooms that has been cleared of all furniture. The symbol is there again, drawing him in to the room with its strange pull.

He asks, "Sam, what the hell is this?" but he hasn't managed to sound right in months now and it lacks the proper acerbic bite. What has his brother been playing with down here? What has he done to Dean that he can't seem to drag himself away? Grasping for the emotions is like trying to breathe this morning.

At the least Sam seems just as drawn to the sigil as Dean is, resting a palm flat on the ash lines. "The Men of Letters thought it's possible to create pagan gods. One of the books said - you just need enough mojo to get the process started, and after that's it's like nuclear fusion: a self-sustaining reaction."

Sam proffers his solid iron knife to Dean hilt-first. "I figure, what's better mojo than two ex-vessels in a bunker full of our supernatural inheritance?"

Dean shoves the knife away left handed because – "Sam, what on _earth_ –"

Sam advances, too angrily, too much for Dean to handle. "Dean, shut up and think about how many people we can help here! Heaven is a mess, Hell is a glorified waiting room, all the other gods are on the run. We can't just try to fix the system any more. We need to create a new one, start from scratch to create something that will put people first instead of jerking them around."

Dean shoves Sam away again, steps back until he can feel himself in the center of the sigil like it's physically wrapped around him. He breathes in, feels something askew shift off-center in a different way, and hisses, _"When will you ever learn?"_

Something like satisfaction simmers under Sam's fierce expression as Dean pushes back. "You need this, Dean. You need that connection to people to remind you what it's all for, you need certainty you're doing the right thing –"

"Bullshit what I need! You can't get enough power even after all it's done to you –"

Ugly, ugly things Dean says. Rage bubbles away where before had been a void. Or was it simply shoved so far down with fear? His hand clenches, unclenches.

Sam throws the knife into the corner of the room while they argue, brings out a medallion on a leather string instead. The same sigil is there, Dean knows in his bones. What has Sam done to them?

"Just shut up and _listen_ ," Sam tells him, and unceremoniously thrusts the medallion into Dean's grasping right hand.

His arm hair stands on end, electricity bursts beneath his skin, a dozen names float to the front of his mind trailing information Dean can't – doesn't - somehow knows. Morgan who made it to her step-brother's graduation is currently weeding tomato beds in her best friend's garden. Howard who had only been trying to help a hitchhiker still feels his shoulder ache even though the wound has completely healed by now. Stephanie who lost her brother three days ago (more days now) cradles her niece to her shoulder and thinks _yes, yes, I will care for you, we are in this together now._

"What have you done?" Dean croaks.

Sam grasps Dean's hand with his own and says, "Listen, Dean, keep listening," closes his eyes, furrows his brow like he used to when Dean quizzed him with Dean's own math homework. Dean trusted Sam's answers then; he can trust now. He closes his eyes, listens to what Sam is directing his way –

Grant from New York is peaceful, lazing on a back porch in late summer heat. Chelsea and Aaron giggle together, dashing across town while they unwrap the world's biggest ball of twine. More – more beyond them – stretching out, contained in this medallion, contained between Sam and Dean and all of Sam's whispered promises to let them rest and put them first.

"How –" Dean chokes.

"It had to start somewhere," Sam says. "Heaven, Hell, Nirvana, Valhalla. Where did they all come from?"

Dean shakes his head. He doesn't know, can't think, something in him burns away like a phoenix.

"We can create something better, Dean. We can start a new system, add others where they fit – our own pantheon, sworn to our goals –"

The knife is in Sam's hands again, extended towards Dean hilt first.

"I need you to keep us balanced, Dean, keep us focused on the humans caught in the middle of all this supernatural crap. These people will be ours, everyone we've ever saved, and no one can touch them if we fight them off."

He accepts the knife this time, scores his palm deep and lets his blood drip onto the ashes of their fallen, rubs it into one face of the medallion and passes it for Sam to cover the other in his blood. Sam chants, sounds that aren't words but feel right like the sigil does, entirely their own, burning up everything else, transforming and molding into a new form.

The sigil ignites, smoke saturating the room yet he and Sam breathe evenly without struggle. He can feel his bones tying themselves to the Bunker, power shivering in the air, him and Sam standing in the epicenter – waiting, waiting, and then –


End file.
